PURPOSE The purpose of this study was: (1) Firstly, do the keywords of the leisure industry research change by period? and (2) Secondly, what keywords symbolize the leisure industry research and how is the detailed research area organized? METHOD This study is conducted to search journal articles on Korea Citation Index(KCI) site to identify research trends related to leisure industry. To achieve this goal, we performed semantic network analysis on 1,069 papers of 328 Korean journals related the studies on leisure industry, which were published between 2002 and 2019. The Netminer was employed to conduct the semantic network analysis. RESULT Firstly, keywords such as sports, tourism, satisfaction, service, water, resource, and policy appeared to be important in the 2000s, while in the 2010s, keywords such as sports, tourism, brand, design, satisfaction, service, and market appeared to be important in the study of the leisure industry by period. Secondly, the co-occurrence word pairs appeared in the order of leisure-sport, leisure-marine, activity-leisure, industry-sport, quality-service, leisure-tourism, design-marine, and sport-tourism. Keywords with high centrality that appeared to be important included sports, tourism, brand, service, design, satisfaction, and culture. The areas of detailed research were found to be seven areas: sports and tourism, leisure and space, service and education, customer and satisfaction, marine and experience, industry and culture, and brand and design. CONCLUSION The semantic network was very useful for elucidating the academic characteristics by visualizing the research trend in the leisure industry in Korea.